“After careful consideration, we found it imperative to disqualify the photographer from the contest. The principle of World Press Photo is to promote high standards in photojournalism. Therefore, we must maintain the integrity of our organization even when the outcome is regrettable.” -Michiel Munneke, managing director of World Press Photo

Lens, PetaPixel, and BJP all have good coverage of the latest photo manipulation scandal in photojournalism: World Press Photo has disqualified Stepan Rudik, 3rd place Sports Features in the 2010 contest, for an ethics violation. Rudik removed an element of a picture (see the slideshow above) in violation of World Press Photo contest regulations against image alteration, specifically this rule: “The content of the image must not be altered. Only retouching which conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry is allowed.” The object seems to stem from the removal of a person’s foot from the background of the picture, which Rudik defended to the BJP, saying, “the photograph I submitted to the contest is a crop, and the retouched detail is the foot of a man which appears on the original photograph, but who is not a subject of the image submitted to the contest.”

I’ve got to echo Asim Rafiqui: What a laughable extreme crop and toning job. Color and tilt correction in photoshop is one thing, moody vignetting in photoshop is another, but this is a whole new level of turning a crap photo into something entirely different. Wow. This, rather than the offending foot, is the bigger problem for the credibility of photojournalism.

The Associated Press has lately taken to strictly enforcing its copyrights and licenses, as it should, especially as regards search engines and news aggregators (the AP insists it isn’t going after bloggers…). The implementation, on the other hand, has been laughable. The latest development, the so-called “Protect, Point, Pay” DRM licensing system, has been given a brutal and deserved parody treatment. This comes as other institutions, including the New York Times, struggle to maintain cash flow to continue (profitable) news operations. David Simon, former Baltimore Sun writer and creator of The Wire, a vocal player in recent news industry ruminations, concludes that a paywall is the best chance for major newspapers’ survival. Rupert Murdoch agrees. Newspaper executives lately have been holding secret meetings trying to figure out how to maintain operational budgets, though always with a careful eye turned toward anti-trust and price-fixing laws. Newspapers want an anti-trust law exemption, which US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi supports but which the Obama administration opposes. Perhaps the news business should be one of those industries to which Bill Maher’s new rule apply: not everything in America must turn a profit.

In the meantime, the Associated Press has also rolled out their quotation licensing software, to hilarious results. One must pay the AP when quoting as little as 5 words from a story. Worse still, perhaps, James Grimmelmann of the Laboratorium, found the AP’s automated licensing software is braindead enough to accept money and grant a license to words not written or owned by the Associated Press. The AP revoked the license and issued a statement (“It is an automated form, thus explaining how one blogger got it to charge him for the words of a former president.”), to which Grimmelmann replies. Of course, Grimmelmann’s just trolling for attention and the AP did well to refund his money for an invalid license, but the organization’s tactics are drawing too much bad publicity.

The Associated Press’s motivations are well-founded. News costs money to produce, and there are numerous outlets using the AP’s reports without paying appropriate licensing fees. Worse, these aggregators receive money for ads placed alongside this content, thus making money off of the illegal/improper/infringing distribution of the AP’s copyrighted materials. But finding an elegant solution to this dilemma has proven quite difficult, and the Associated Press’s recent attempts have only exacerbated the problem.

(via Reddit, Metafilter, Slashdot, and elsewhere)

As expected, Americans Laura Ling and Euna Lee were put on trial in North Korea and the pair have just been sentenced to 12 years “reform through labor” in a prison camp, according to the Korean Central News Agency. The pair were reporting on the China-North Korea border for CurrentTV when they were arrested and jailed. The Obama administration has said they are trying “all possible channels” to resolve the matter and secure the women’s release, but North Korea has become increasingly hostile to negotiations over the past weeks and months. Ling and Lee have become pawns in high stakes political negotiations, and it may cost them their lives. The prison camps in North Korea have an alarmingly high death rate, according to reports.

The New York Times Lens Blog has just published a heretofore unknown picture of the Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. AP reporter Terril Jones had been covering the demonstrations and snapped a picture of the famous confrontation between an unknown man and a line of tanks. The Lens blog has more details. I am quite surprised Jones had shown the picture only to friends previously.

Lens also interviewed 4 photographers who each got the iconic shot: Charlie Cole, Stuart Franklin, Jeff Widener, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. This is not to be missed; great behind-the-scenes stories about the shooting conditions and the difficulty of getting the pictures out (involving toilets and poorly-dressed hippies!). Youtube has video of the confrontation and the PBS Frontline documentary Tank Man explores contemporary Chinese perspectives on the famous photo.

James Fallows reports about his experience in Tiananmen Square the night before the 20th Anniversary this week and his wife’s the day of and Shanghaiist has video of plainclothes police interrupting international news reports with, of all things, umbrellas.

Meanwhile, BagNewsNotes has a dispatch from Alan Chin in Beijing on the Anniversary, ChinaBeat has a ton of contemporary and historical reporting on the 1989 events, and there’s plenty more. DanWei’s must-read China news is another great place for a variety of reporting and remembrance; I can’t link to search results, so you’ll just have to type in the words yourself. And here’s a couple of stories about information about 1989 slipping past China’s censors in the past couple of years. Magnum’s also got a small but interesting edit of a number of photographers’ pictures from Tiananmen.

Meanwhile, further south, it’s been a couple of days just like all others.

As the news industry continues to tank, dwindling fees have caused many to wonder when journalism (and photography) will become a pay-to-play game. Huffington Post has put another nail in the coffin of the notion of a paying career in journalism. Now, instead of just contributing to the site for free (where does that $20+ million in seed money go?), would-be Huffington Post writers can pay for the chance to be an intern at the site. The current bid is $13,000 for “two-three month[s]” interning for Huffington Post. The money raised in the auction will go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and there are 125 other “celebrity experiences” up for grabs in the auction.

(via bloggasm)

German publishing company Jahreszeitenverlag, whose publications include “Merian”, “Für Sie”, “Petra”, “Feinschmecker,” trying to pull a fast one with a new contract forced on photographers in Germany. Previously, like any other decent contract, work done for Jahreszeitenverlag was fairly compensated and embargoed for a set period after which the photographer (the copyright owner) could resell the images or use them any way he or she wanted; if Jahreszeitenverlag’s magazines wanted to reuse the photos, a new sales fee would be determined and paid according to usage.

Recently the company has foisted a new contract on contributors, and it’s horrible. According to the new contract (which retains the photographer’s usual daily royalty fee of around 350 euros), ownership of all images taken for the assignment will pass to the publisher who commissioned this assignment; the photographer will no longer receive any royalties at all from subsequent use of the image material; second sales of the images will only be possible through the publishing company’s own syndication. Sounds like a royal screw job. German photographers have rightfully rejected the contract and are organizing under FreeLens, a German freelance photographers’ organization. But it gets worse.

Now the company has been preying on international contributors, likely unfamiliar with the Jahreszeitenverlag contract controversy. They’ve been sending off assignments rejected by German photographers to international contributors, hoping they can cut off the German photographers ability to negotiate the contract. Many photographers have asked their agencies to place an embargo on any dealings with Jahreszeitenverlag titles until the conflict is acceptably resolved.

There’s a little information about the dispute at Freelens (google translate), and there’s also a petition to Jahreszeitenverlag that’s nearing 3000 signatures from concerned members of the international and German photo community.

Do your part. Refuse any work from Jahreszeitenverlag. Add your name to the petition. Spread the word.

More information:

• Freelens press release: Jahreszeitenverlag is the “gravedigger of photojournalism” (original german)
• Interview with Freelens CEO Lutz Fischmann about the dispute (original german)

Readability : An Arc90 Lab Experiment from Arc90 on Vimeo.

I have lived in a world without print media, and it is horrible. Until a couple of weeks ago, when I found a source for cheap issues of Newsweek International in Nanjing, my news diet has been entirely digital. Armed with Newsweek, and a shipment of magazines (Time, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, New Yorker, among others) from a visiting friend made me realize again how much the switch to digital reading has affected news consumption. If my experience is any indication of the future of newspapers and magazines, I’m frightened for our collective sanity and eyes. Readability has saved my life, or at least, made reading online a lot less awful. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still bad, but the news has once again become…well…readable.

I’ve been reading the news online for most of the time that I’ve been aware of the news. In fact, I don’t think I really remember a time when I’ve read the news when most news wasn’t available online, generally for free. The change from print to digital has ruined my reading habits. First, without a ready supply of print media, I’m without the news over breakfast, in the subway or bus, waiting in a doctor’s office, in a park, during a lull between assignments, nodding off at bedtime…. A raggedy looking, folded up periodical has been a constant companion. Moving to China a couple years ago, though, all but eliminated print journalism from my life.

On the screen, I can’t concentrate on an article for more than a few minutes (a new email has come in, or maybe there’s just one more picture that needs to be toned…). Long form articles spread over multiple pages are annoying at best. More than that, I sit looking at a screen plenty already during the day, and would rather relax while reading than hunch staring at a bright monitor. The Kindle might solve this problem a little, but have you seen how awful the New York Times looks on a Kindle?

And let’s not forget about how completely unreadable most major media sites actually are. With ads, blurbs, top right and left navigation bars, and the like, it can be hard to find the content, especially when reading the local newspaper sites. While some sites provide a no-frills printable version of articles, not all media give the option. Enter Readability, a customizable bookmarklet that automatically eliminates page cruft and resizes the page to a custom width, type size, and typeface. I think I’m in love. Put the bookmarklet in your toolbar and click on it when you’re on an unreadable page. More often than not, you’ll get a perfect-sized column of easily readable text that is exactly the article you want to read and nothing more. Photography included in the article will be interspersed throughout the text, though captions sometimes end up looking like part of the next. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a far sight better than every newspaper and magazine website currently on the internet.

Another great option that I used to use is the Multi-Column Articles greasemonkey script (wikipedia explanation of greasemonkey), but I haven’t been impressed with greasemonkey support in Chrome, my new browser of choice. The usefulness of that script, which emulates a newspaper’s multi-column layout, is limited to a dozen or so websites, though most of the big news sites are covered.

In what could be a small followup to Joerg Colberg’s earlier apprehension of black and white documentary style photography, Martin Parr’s penned a pithy analysis of handout photos provided by pop-singer Madonna from her recent attempt to adopt a child in Malawi.

Choosing sepia is all to do with trying to make the image look romantic and idealistic. It’s sort of a soft version of propaganda. … This predilection for sepia is all part of the baggage we have about photography … people seem to think it looks more real.” -Martin Parr

As media outlets dwindle, the majority of the viewing public’s connection with visual communication will increasingly be the province of handouts, PR shots, and propaganda, if it hasn’t already. While some might lament the failings of the mainstream media, one hopes newsrooms endeavour to hold themselves to a higher and less manipulative visual language than a publicity campaign. Analyses such as Parr’s here are necessary to the understanding of what we’re shown.

And while we’re at it, Randy Cohen, of the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s regular “The Ethicist” column (my favorite magazine column, next to Harper’s Index and Harper’s Weekly Review), analyzes the ethical concerns of international adoption for his new NYT blog “Moral of the Story.”

A lot of photojournalists hope their photos can make a difference. Informing the public is one avenue, having powerful people who make decisions see the photos is another. Andrew Craft’s great photo, of a military family saying goodbye as the husband and father ships off for deployment, will be doing the latter. He talks a little about it here and his paper mentions the event here.

The city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, decided to give Craft’s photo, taken as a staff photographer for the the Fayetteville Observer, to Michelle Obama on her recent visit to the city. Receiving the photo, a stark portrayal of the domestic toll of the war in Iraq, Michelle Obama said, “Thank you…this picture is just moving. It says so much, and it is going up in my office tomorrow.” Video of the speech at C-Span.

The first I learned about the tragic CCTV fire in Beijing was reading about it here in Matt’s post, despite being an 8 or 10 hour train ride from Beijing. That’s because, with only a few exceptions, the news was absent from China’s television and newspapers. News media and online forums and blogs were issued a gag order of sorts by the government, prompting one internet forum to cull it’s 2000 message thread down to 9. That night and the next morning, I saw nothing on Chinese television or in the newsstands about the fire.  The New York Times describes the Chinese domestic media blackout, which drew much anger from the public online and led many to snark that CCTV (China’s notoriously controlled and ironically named state media) created the biggest story of the new year and then failed to cover it.  The title of this post, by the way, comes from some Beijingers’ nickname for the iconic CCTV towers (which didn’t burn): Big Underpants.

I was in Haerbin that night, a bit to the north of Beijing, where Lantern Festival celebrations were in full swing. The fireworks were shooting up between the buildings, as in the picture above, but it was nothing like the view from an apartment building in Beijing:

 

The Big Picture has a few shots of the blaze and aftermath in their Lantern Festival post, and there are also numerous firsthand accounts with pictures and video that have made their way online. Some of the other heavy-hitting China blogs have their own analysis: Black and White Cat compares CCTV coverage early in the night with picture-less coverage after midnight, Danwei aggregates links and translates some reports, Chinasmack has additional pictures and more information on the censorship, and Shanghaiist has even more pictures.  The Architect’s Newspaper Blog also has extensive coverage of the fire and its aftermath.

CCTV eventually came clean and acknowledged responsibility for the fire, which killed 1 firefighter and injured others.  The television company hired a company to set off several hundred large fireworks to mark the holiday, but did so without a permit, which has now resulted in 12 people being arrested (the BBC has more details) including the chief of CCTV’s building construction.

And for good measure, here’s a post from Alex Pasternack in 2007 about the significance of the building and the process of its construction.